1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a device for unloading and orienting articles stacked in tiers on a pallet.
2. Prior Art
In modern brewery bottling plants, cartons or cases of empty bottles are stacked in tiers on pallets and stored in a storage area until the bottles are to be cleaned and refilled. When the bottles are used, the entire pallet load is delivered, for example, by a forklift vehicle, to a sorting area and the individual cartons are then moved from the sorting area onto a conveyor. As the cartons travel along the conveyor, empty bottles are lifted out of the cases by means of an automatic machine and transferred onto a conveyor for delivering them to a soaker. Thus, it will be seen that the handling of empty bottles in a bottling plant is a quite highly automated operation.
There is however, one major step in this entire procedure which has not been successfully mechanized, this being the unloading of the cases of empty bottles from the pallet and placing these on a sorting table. The handtransfer of the cases of empty bottles is a very tedious and unpleasant job and is, therefore, most unpopular in a bottling plant. Moreover, there are many instances of broken cases with wet bottoms or partial bottoms and this results in frequent spilling of empty bottles during hand unloading of pallets.